Cox Cock Blocks Craigslist

Silicon Valley Watcher digs into a situation whereby Cox Interactive is throttling its customer's access to Craigslist because, perhaps, Cox Interactive parent company Cox Enterprises feels people should read classified ads in Cox Media newspapers instead of on Craigslist. It appears Cox Interactive has been working with security software from Authentium since April 2005 and on February 23 of 2006 Authentium did acknowledge it was, in fact, blocking Craiglist from Cox Interactive users. Craigslist has asked Authentium several times to stop blocking their site to no avail. It's one thing to get competitive when your business is on the way to the toilet. It's entirely another thing when that competitive spirit turns nasty and wreaks of illegal activity.

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Comments

Comments

Cox customers shouldn't suck up to that. They should cut their Cox and that will teach that company a lesson.

Posted by: Anonymous on June 8, 2006 11:44 AM

What the hell...did you hire a copywriter Steve?

Again, creative headline wins my attention!

Posted by: John Boy on June 8, 2006 1:24 PM

Come on, people. Do you REALLY think a company like Cox would risk the backlash for that type of petty battle? Here's what it says on Cox's website:

June 8, 2006

Some Cox customers with the Cox Security Suite may be experiencing problems when accessing Craig's List.

Cox does not block access to any legal website and Craig's List is no exception. The problem lies with how the Security Suite software interprets Craig’s List’s initial packet connections, which results in an extremely slow connection.

Authentium — the company that designed Cox's security software — is aware of the problem and their engineers have modified the firewall driver by creating a beta version that resolves the issue. This version will be part of the next release of Cox High Speed Internet Security Suite and will be available to all Cox High Speed Internet users later this summer.

What do you expect them to say in a statement? "Yes, we've been blocking Craigslist for months now. We're really sorry about it but we just think newspapers are still better at providing you classified advertising listings."?

At least Cox is keeping up with SpamCop who a week ago blocked all Quest email accounts.

Posted by: Roy Coffman on June 12, 2006 3:30 PM

i'm on cox, and it seems fine. count me as one more in the 'huh?' column.

...update: turns out i'm not affected because i'm not using some extra piece of crap software cox provides. so they're not actually blocking the website to their internet customers, but through another means. i'm not really sure what to think.